Women don't need cups!

Our Governor-General, Adrienne Clarkson, wants the Canadian and American women's hockey teams to play for the Stanley Cup this year. Apparently she is serious too! This has to be one of the worst ideas I've ever heard in my life. Last year the Tampa Bay Lighting fought through a grueling 82 game schedule before winning 4 best of 7 playoff rounds. It is a disgrace to the cup to allow a signle series to decide the winner. Worse yet, it is with women hockey players. Not that I don't enjoy watching women's hockey, because I do enjoy it, but the Stanley Cup should be going to the best team not the best team of people that do not happen to have penises. This is so arbitrary we may as well just say whoever wins the QMJHL this year gets the cup. Nevermind that the OHL and WHL are the same level we could give it to the Memorial Cup winner, but no, let's just pick a league out of a hat and let them have the cup. There are so many better choices out there. Have the winners (or top 2 or 3 teams) of all the major hockey leauges in the world operating right now and have a playoffs. At least that would have a shred of legitimacy with NHL players probably on each of the rosters.

The other problem is not only how bad of a choice for teams to play for the cup, but that they are not legally allowed to play for it. The cup will not be awarded to anyone but an NHL team this year. Says one of the cup trustees, "It's really sad not to see it competed for, but under the terms of our agreement, there's no basis under which we could take it back and say that someone else is going to compete for it." But of course we can't expect Adrienne Clarkson to show discretion with anyone else's property the way she spends OUR money on completely useless things.

Please Adrienne Clarkson, if you want to be more useful to Canada follow my advice: shut up, buy a plane ticket to some unkown location - one way - take a million dollars spending money, and leave us alone until your term is over!

Ranting

If you don't care about sports or other random rambling rants, you should probably stop reading now. I am just getting very upset about things and want to rant somewhere.

Well the NHL lockout is getting huge coverage today, in Canada at least. The two sides didn't read my previous post on this obviously! So now they agreed on a cap with no linkage to revenues, they are just different by under $10 million now. NHL went up to $42.5 million with an unknown luxury tax equation below that, said it was a final offer, NHLPA rejected it. Good job guys on waiting until over half of the season was done to finally show how far you were willing to move. I hope both sides feel great about themselves. The owners at least have the excuse that they are losing less money this year than they did last year, but for the players, they would been better off taking a crappy deal and getting an extra year's pay. So that means unless one side was just bluffing, no hockey this year. I do not understand all these polls that say people don't want hockey back this year. If you don't want to watch it if it comes back, don't turn your TV to that channel. I want hockey back! It is only going to get worse between April and June when playoffs should be on TV... and yes Leafs fans, NHL does keep playing past the first week of May.

So what the hell is up with the Raptors? They wait way too long to get rid of Vince, get nothing for him as his value falls just below an average WNBA player, then as they start to play better without that cancer, then Alston causes trouble? He does realize he is Rafer freaking Alston, right? Someone should tell him this, and maybe he will calm down and play his mediocre basketball.

Why couldn't Mike Drint take one for the team and die before the voting happened? I didn't know the Grammy's were a lifetime memorial award for someone that probably already received a million lifetime achievement awards! I did not even know, before I saw the nominees, that Ray Charles had made a CD this year! When we focus on the past for a current award we end up with Karl Malone winning MVP of the NBA. At least the NBA had good precedent for this, Barkley won it 4 years earlier. We should be able to retroactively give these awards back to Michael Jordan.

I was on the subway the other day and I saw a fire on the track. The driver calmly left his little capartment, walked down to the track, put out fire, then kept driving like nothing happened. Well I was impressed how well he handled the situation, but this also worried me. How often are there 4 foot tall fires in the middle of the subway tunnels that make this guy so well trained? Also, what on the track caused this fire? Obviously nothing had to be investigated, so this had to be common! Good old TTC.

How am I supposed to feel guilty about downloading music when I give money to the music industry when I buy blank CD's for legal purposes? Screw them. I bought a Green Day CD in November (it was Buy Nothing Day, I had to buy something), first CD I bought in a long time, and I could not play it! I don't own any other CD player than my computer, but the CD has some stupid copy protection thing on it. I had to download a program to rip CD's to mp3 form just to listen to the CD I purchased. The other thing I could have done would be to download the CD from one of those pay sites. These sites give you the music is a format that I do not want to use, and then they put stupid restrictions on the file limiting the amount of times you can move it from computer to computer or put it on devices like mp3 players. So what this comes down to is I could have downloaded the Green Day CD the day it came out for free in my choice of 3 different qualities and I could do whatever I wanted with the files OR pay for something less convenient.... I wonder why downloading music is so popular. After the courts ruled that ISP's do not have to give up names of customers, I feel this is legal precedent to say that I'm allowed to download. This industry treats its paying customers so poorly, I will never buy a CD again.

Speaking of my grudges, I will also never buy Sprite. In grade 10, we had some 'important option assembly' to go to in the gym. It ended up being a 45 minute long sprite commercial, trying to get students to chant "Drink Sprite!" and crap like that. I had purchased a Sprite at lunch that day before this happened, and it was the last one I ever bought (6 years ago). I think it was a dishonest way to advertise to captive high school students. If I knew what I was attending beforehand, then fine, I can handle advertising, but that was done so poorly, I hold a grudge.

My newest company grudge is with Telus. I have a Telus phone that I got right at the end of December. It stops working, so I take it into the Telus store to get fixed since it is under waranty. I had a previous Telus phone so I say I can activate that instead of getting a loaner phone from them, but get this, they expect ME to pay $25 fee for switching phones. It is their fault that they gave me phone that lasted less than 2 months, I did not electively choose to go to an old model for the fun of it. Their customer service person was way less than helpful (if you have no authority to help me, don't waste my time), so I have to get her manager, explain the whole situation again, spend 10 minutes arguing to get the $25 off. This is complete BS, I am the one that was inconvenienced by having my phone break down, I expected the very LEAST for me to break even, this isn't some nice service Telus was doing me (any good company would have given me a discount for my trouble). So if you enjoy good customer service in a cell phone company, never use Telus.

The biggest thing that annoys me this term is my union. The PWU takes advantage of co-op students. The union is for full time blue collar workers, it does nothing to represent a student working in the finance department. I get no benefits that the union fights for since it is temporary employment, my wages are very comparable to other co-op students so it certainly didn't fight for a higher salary, yet $15.81 comes out of my paycheck WEEKLY to these assholes. Co-op students are great cash grabs to put in your bargaining units, we aren't there long enough to do anything about it, but from each position they will get close to $1000. This is stealing from students that can use this money for many things. Many students take co-op to help pay for school, and it really troubles me that this organization can be so cruel. I've tried to get out of paying the fees, but by Canadian law if you are in a bargaining unit you have to pay union dues. To get declassified from the bargaining unit takes much longer than a 4 month term allows. There is another law that if you have strong beliefs against unions you can give the money instead to a registered charity (but you are still required to pay money), but I don't even have time to do this. There is nothing in the CBA that has this provision, so I need to take it to the BOD level. This simply isn't possible for a co-op student.

Don't drink and fly

Nothing to say here except this may have been funniest news article I read in a while. if this doesn't make your day better, than I'm not sure what is wrong with you.

Bias In Education

I'm in 4th year university now, more and more I am noticing a trend, my classes are spouting their right wing propaganda at me. For instance, I was going though my actuarial science flash lectures today (distance education) and my prof makes a remark that the only party in Canada to impose a government monopoly on insurance is the NDP in 3 provinces, taking away from the proper free market pricing. Then said the current BC government will probably allow more freedom, as if this was a good thing. I mean come on, have some respect for the left.

In third year I had a finance prof that used to work at the Fraser Institute. He actually had the gall to claim that he hoped to have a united right (pre-merger obviously) to have lower taxes. He spent my valuable class time explaining to me how corporate tax cuts benefit all Canadians. We are at university here, aren't you supposed to be teaching me about how corporations are evil? I mean, stop it with all this 'logic' and 'facts'!

I've heard of one finance prof, during 2004 election, give a rant on why everyone should vote Conservative. My business policy prof openly wanted Kerry to the lose the election. I had my first year micro-economics prof explain why free trade benefits everyone the very semester before my macro-economics prof showed us a graph showing speed of economic development in third would countries with better trade policies was much faster. The same micro-economics prof also explained that our union and minimum wage laws are partially responsible for our higher unemployment rate than our southern neighbors.

I hope someday we can get rid of this conservative bias in our universities. My profs should know better than using proof to validify their comments, this is simply unacceptable to me. (sorry this was just to gloat to all of you that are in programs with all lefty profs!)

Klein's passing

No, Ralph Klein did not actually die, but the Klein we all once knew and loved is gone. Sure he was a right wing asshole, but he was OUR asshole. He fought for conservatism in our socialistic country, helping to ensure Alberta being the most successful province in the country. Don't get me wrong, I am in no way implying that he is the worst Premier in the country, I still believe that he is by far the best. I just think that the best way to judge him isn't against his pitiful competition, but against himself of only a few years ago. So in the last week Klein says that he wants to raise minimum wage up from $5.90 to $7.00, put in a tuition freeze, and now have a stat holiday for the centinial anniversery of the province.

I'll attack these in order, starting with minimum wage. I left Alberta in 2001 upon graduation of high school. During highschool I worked at McDonalds for about $6.50-7.00/hour. This priced me right below where the new minimum wage may be, but I was still clearly higher than the $5.90. This is because I would not accept a job that only paid $5.90, competitive wage for fast food jobs in Lethbridge dictated that you could not hire high school punks for minimum wage. We may have not known about supply and demand, yet we knew how to use it to our advantage. So now that it is $7.00, it will be great, all the highschool kids get bumped up to $7.00! (It really is only effecting people in high school of course, because Alberta has the lowest rate of employment at minimum wage in the country. Full time employees at fast food restaurants are already above the $7.00 minimum.) So who would argue against giving high school students a better wage? Well I would. When you set a minimum wage, you are setting a price floor, as microeconomics teaches you, whenever you have a price floor that is above market price there will always be a surplus, in this case the surplus would be of highschool students. Less jobs will be available with a higher cost of labour, coupled with the fact that more teenagers may want jobs. Yes, McDonalds will not close down because of the higher wage, but they may schedule less people per shift. Less employees mean lower quality of service, and thus less customers. McDonalds would only do this to the point of maximizing profits obviously, and they can do that by lowering expenses (less workers) and revenues (less customers). On a smaller company basis, this change will just come straight out of expenses (and hopefully not bankrupt new companies as their forcasts certainly did not include $7/hour wage) as it is hard to cut 1/7th of your employees from each shift when you only have 2 working.

So there will be less highschool students that can get jobs now in Alberta, how are they supposed to pay for university? Well don't fear, as we all know the best way to correct a wrong is with another wrong, we can freeze tuition! I don't know where to start on this one as there is just so much wrong to fit into a short space. What ends up happening with tuition freezes is that it comes out of tax payers pockets to subsidize education for young people. The cost of education should rest on the person that benefits the most. I do not want to pay for someone to do a philosophy degree just so they have to be retrained if they ever the workforce. If you don't want to pay for my degrees, that's ok too, I don't expect everyone to like my choices either(I'm not claiming all my choices are the best).

Now he wants to add an extra holiday to celebrate 100 years of Alberta. What crap. Again, holidays are something that sound nice, everyone loves taking them, but what Klein did not consider was the economic impact that this day will have.

Taken from a Globe and Mail article:
"My main objection is he's creating a political benefit and imposing a private-sector cost," said Dan Kelly, western vice-president for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, a lobby group for small and medium-sized companies. There would be a $712-million loss in productivity for the day off, according to Mr. Kelly.

I want my Ralph Klein back that helped businesses, not by corporate welfare (Alberta is only province to my knowlege that does not give grants for companies to come to the province), but by getting the government out of the way. I miss the days when Klein's idea of handouts included walking into a homeless shelter and flinging change at them, I know it is in you Ralph, please come back!

Free Heroin

http://www.canada.com/national/story.html?id=60230b74-4140-4716-bc8d-dab295dc7846

Well I've never used Heroin before, but now that it is free I want some! While the price may be more inelastic for addicts, I guess the price elasticity for new users does have an impact on sales.

Seriously though, I cannot understand this program. I don't really care if someone wants to slowly kill themself with drugs, but to pay to help them is nothing short of outrageous! The "logic" behind this, if you can call it logic, is that if they aren't out looking for money, they can be improving their lives. Did that make your head hurt too? These people will be on heroin in their free time! How are you supposed to make positive changes in your life WHILE you are on heroin. Are you going to hire someone that is on hard drugs? I certainly wouldn't. This isn't a program that slowly eases them off of the drug, it just gives it to them. If they were going to be motivated to start working, it would be when they needed to pay for the heroin on their own dime. If your only reason to get money was to buy drugs, then there is no need to get money now. Welfare can pay for your food/rent and government will give you the drugs too. Now that's what I call living the 'high' life! They say theft is reduced due to the program, but I have to wonder if this is a long term benefit, or if it just that theft goes down as long as they are given the drugs.

Voting at 16?

Well I haven't posted for a while. I've been working crazy hours (shh don't tell my union... seriously, please don't tell them), behind in both of my distance ed classes, and I seem to be going out every day to do at least something, not including Sundays - not religious, I just like sleep. I cannot wait for this freaking annual report to be done and get to working normal union hours for 'the Province'...

So I am hearing renewed debate about lowering the voting age to 16. This is another issue where I am on the fence, but I am leaning towards letting it go lower. Why 16, why not 15, or 17, or 14? No idea... I guess 16 you can drive, which I guess was also arbitrary to set driving age to this. So any arguments I present will be for just making voter age lower, why is it specifically 16 though is beyond me.

Well a thing that worries many conservatives about lowering the voting age is that the 16 year olds would just vote NDP/Liberal. This is hard to give any good stats on this, but I will use some anecdotal evidence here. When I was in grade 12 during the 2000 election, we had the candidates come to my high school for a debate. I was not at this debate as I was gone to Calgary on an accounting competition (yep, I was for sure cool in high school!), but I did hear that the NDP candidate said he was very pro legalization of marijuana. So when we had our school mock election, NDP won. For those of you that don't know, I went to high school in Lethbridge, Alberta. Mormons were about 30-40% of my school (guessing), and they are a very conservative group, yet NDP was still able to overcome. This showed me that 16 year olds, on average, have nothing better to worry about than whether then can legally smoke up. This is not to say that because you are in a certain demographic that happens to vote a certain way you should discounted, but rather that if the most pressing issue in your life is whether the cops can charge you or not for hotboxing your car at Henderson Lake, maybe you shouldn't be deciding the fiscal, monetary, international relations, etc. policies for our country!

To argue this point, you can probably claim that only the more politically involved 16 & 17 year olds would be going to the polls to vote. For instance, the voting was done in Social Studies classes, my Honours/Advanced Placement class voted in Canadian Alliance (side note: proves that as intelligence goes up, so does your likelihood to vote conservative), and we would have been the ones that are more likely take the initiative to actually go to the polls.
[Aside] In this very class, a fellow blogger that happens to be sharing this blog with me... not to name names... voted LIBERAL in this mock election. [/Aside]

Someone arguing back would then say that even though majority of high school students wouldn't care about voting, teachers may actually take students to voting booths! Many schools actually host polling stations, it wouldn't surprise me if teachers took their classes down the gym/library and made them vote.

So that's the internal argument that is going on in my head. I want to encourage youth to participate if they understand the process/issues, but not the moronic youth that I went to high school with. Allowing voting at 16 may have the effect of making people at a younger age more politically aware since what they think may actually matter. Voting in a mock election should not stress anyone since it simply doesn't matter, but if you are voting in the real deal, many will take that responsibility more seriously.